Gaspar Noe is so unknown over here that I wouldn't blame you if your first guess was that somebody had finally invented an upscale perfume for asthmatics. But my hunch is that that could change soon, so here's a homegrown comparison to help you out: Think Quentin Tarantino with a purpose in life. Unlike Tarantino, whose involuted burlesques only toy with an offensiveness he's simultaneously congratulating us for being too hip to feel, this Argentina-born Frenchman's shock tactics really do leave audiences just appalled.

Noe's first feature, 1998's I Stand Alone, ransacked the inner life of a brutalized, rancor-spouting, unemployed butcher (spot the metaphor) for corrosively funny and then horrific insights into la belle France -- "shithole of cheese and Nazi lovers," as the hero put it. The director's new Irreversible tackles man the sexual animal instead, via a grueling story of rape plus payback whose centerpiece scene -- Monica Bellucci getting sodomized and beaten up for ten nightmarish minutes -- triggered walkouts and abuse at Cannes last spring. It went on to win best film at the Stockholm International Film Festival, but you know the Swedes -- maybe they were unaware it wasn't a musical.

I Stand Alone had a New York run so brief that the movie could have been screening on the side of a bus, and an American release of Irreversible initially looked as unlikely as Donald Rumsfeld getting named Mr. Congeniality by the Academie Francaise. But Irreversible is now slated to open here this month, so get ready for a critical catfight. Noe may or may not be the best director you've never heard of, especially since our current cultural insularity makes the list of contenders endless. (Wong Kar-Wai, Bueller...anybody?) But he's the most dynamic filmmaker France has produced in years -- a cosmopolitan barbarian whose approach welds impudence and formal resourcefulness to an uncool, reckless sense of urgency.

Available in a great-looking DVD from Strand Releasing, I Stand Alone is often called a French Taxi Driver. But one reason I prefer it to its celebrated model is that Noe gives us a stupid man being pushed to the brink -- middle-aged, unglamorous Philippe Nahon, who's like a slightly more articulate (no great challenge there) Aldo Ray. With Arab-bashing and raving homophobia playing leapfrog in his mental cesspool, the hero's voice-over spleen is also politically loaded in ways Travis Bickle's psychosis kept conveniently moot. Yet I Stand Alone is also a hard-hitting movie that's encased in a parody of the absurdity of making hard-hitting movies. The Hobbesian bleakness of the butcher's lot is telegraphed in sick-joke cuts so economical, they're like Bunuel meeting Chuck Jones.

Irreversible, on the other hand, doesn't include a single gag, which is one reason a lot of it is -- you've been warned -- no picnic. Technically, it's prodigious; each complicated installment of the story is shot in a virtuoso single take, with the camera scuttling down mean streets and slithering after the protagonists at a crowded party. But the action is so jangled and sordid that viewers may not register the feat. At the outset, Noe dumps us in a vicious gay sex club, unsubtly called the Rectum, where two frantic men are hunting a pimp who one of them then beats to death. It takes a while to catch on that the narrative is unspooling in reverse order, and poor Gaspar must have had heart failure when he heard about Memento. The avenging pair are Vincent Cassel as impulsive, irresponsible Marcus, who's almost literally gone ape, and worried-faced Albert Dupontel as his reflective friend Pierre -- the boyfriend and ex-boyfriend, respectively, of the rape victim Bellucci plays.

Left vulnerable because Marcus's clowning and doping exasperate her into leaving the party alone, Bellucci's Alex is, I'm afraid, Noe's idea of the female principle: a fertility goddess who exists only to be degraded by male egotism and brutality. Befitting a director whose dumbest tic is his conviction that the ultimate truth about life -- its bottom line, you might say -- is buggery, Irreversible is as reductive a view of human behavior as Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs. Equating homosexuality with hellish perversity is a throwback, too, but as the world's first feminist Neanderthal, Noe isn't exactly PC. As schematic movies go, this one packs a lot in -- like that fluid, casually observant party scene, or the brilliantly staged, subliminally tense subway conversation among the three principals on the way there, when a ravishing Bellucci playfully tells Dupontel, as a grinning Cassel looks on, that his drawback in bed was that he wasn't selfish enough. Needless to say, it's Pierre -- the civilized one -- who ends up dispatching the rapist, to save Marcus from being attacked.

Since the movie opens with it, the outcome is as predetermined as an outcome can be. But the flipped chronology isn't just formalist gamesmanship, as it was in Memento. Presumably, we can all agree that "Time destroys everything" -- Irreversible's motto -- is fortune-cookie wisdom even when it's written in splattered brains, and yet the emotional effect of being led backward from violence to tranquillity is powerful. At each step, Noe's camera work gets calmer, culminating in the benignly lit playfulness of Cassel's and Bellucci's late-afternoon lovemaking (and slightly too symmetry-friendly banter, but you can't have everything). Evoking serenity only to accelerate it into hysteria, the final image ranks with the most wondrous closing shots ever filmed; it's saying, "And we all lived happily ever beforehand."

Irreversible is hard to take and easy to quarrel with, but it's also an amazing movie. As for its most notorious scene, you bet it's graphic, but prurient it isn't; it could have put Wilt Chamberlain off sex for a week. Noe's real daring is to let the scene grind on so implacably that we may start to find Bellucci's ordeal, of all things, tedious -- to our own instant mortification. The most beautiful woman in movies is also unlikely to win any acting awards for Irreversible, but when it comes to giving it up for the greater glory of cinema, she ought to be canonized.

Better Than the Movie He's in...as Usual

Brendan Fraser isn't what you'd call low-profile, but I'm starting to think he's the most underrated actor around, and I'm probably not the only one. For a goof with a hulking frame and a face like a shrewd cheeseburger, he's been comfortably pitch perfect in a surprising variety of roles -- while never calling attention to himself at the material's expense, a perk even that reticent shrewdie Harrison Ford takes for granted. But the aplomb required to stay the likable, resilient center of an effects-driven popcorn special like The Mummy rarely gets kudos, and Fraser can't catch a break even when he's trying something nervier. The most inventive movie he's starred in, Henry Selick's Monkeybone, got hacked up by the nervous studio and tossed into a Dumpster on release. Call it a strategy or a jinx, but he's also developing a habit of taking second place to eminent castmates: Ian McKellen's dapper anguish in Gods and Monsters got all the attention, but Fraser's astute performance as the good-hearted lummox that McKellen doesn't quite seduce was more memorable. Now it's happened to him again, with his excellent work in The Quiet American overshadowed by Michael Caine's plummier part.

Delayed by Miramax's jitters that George W. Bush's America might not appreciate an unflattering look at our Vietnam debacle's origins, Phillip Noyce's film version of Graham Greene's novel got a limited New York and L.A. engagement late last fall only because Caine successfully lobbied Harvey Weinstein to keep Sir Michael's Oscar hopes alive. The rest of us have had to wait until now to see what the fuss was about -- or rather the total lack of fuss, since Noyce's movie is too wan to be a fair test of our stomach for criticism. When an adaptation is this unctuous about the presumed greatness of its source material, you can't help noticing that Greene's love triangle of a world-weary Brit (Caine) and a creepily dogged American crusader (Fraser) vying for a Saigon girl named Phuong (Do Thi Hai Yen, who's as pretty as a sunset but about as verbal) is actually a silly story -- one that doesn't dramatize the hefty themes it thinks it does. Even though the Vietnamese dote on the novel like it's The B-52 in the Rye, I've always thought it was claptrap; no author so besotted with that sawdust-leaking narcissistic projection, the cynical but anguished old-Asia-hand reporter, has much call to berate us naive Yanks about our capacity for self-delusion.

Aside from the acting of the two male leads, the movie's all proud atmospherics and unearned tendentiousness -- the "You'll just have to trust us that this is profound" tone that even Academy members have to be poked awake to vote for. While Caine's performance is as expert as they say, Sir Michael shows us something new only in the scene when the distraught old journalist invades the American legation to confront his rival; he's broken and babbling, and you're caught between dismay that the actor is finally looking his age and admiration for how shrewdly he's using it. Fraser, on the other hand, is appropriately unsettling from his introduction on; he plays the character as if he's never read the book and has no idea he's its villain, which is why he ends up doing better by Greene's concept than the concept may deserve.

DVD Watch: The Greatest Movie You Can't Get

Back in 1962, Lawrence of Arabia laid the keel for the biz's idea of a classy spectacular: a stately, visually lavish plod in the footsteps of somebody famous, although in Lawrence's case -- and many others -- the viewer's ability to decipher the nature of the hero's historical importance came in a distant second to the fact that his deeds were photogenic. But the following year brought a vastly different, no less influential epic: Luchino Visconti's great elegy The Leopard, with a magnificently grave Burt Lancaster as a Sicilian aristocrat facing changing times. If you're one of those who raced out to buy the Godfather boxed set -- thanks to which we can now chalk up Part III as an ecological disaster, too -- The Leopard is the movie whose DVD release you should be agitating for. It's the source for not only Francis Ford Coppola's melancholy arias but also Bertolucci's sumptuousness -- not to mention one of the few times an important literary work (Giuseppe di Lampedusa's only novel was a masterpiece) has become a movie milestone as well.

In one online poll, The Leopard made the top-ten list of movies that people most wanted on DVD -- remarkably, since it was a box-office dud here in 1963. Europeans can buy a fully restored, two-disc version, but one that's -- how'd you guess? -- incompatible with U.S. players. In the States, even beat-up video versions aren't easy to come by; the only time I've seen the film myself was in an unrestored theatrical print that looked as if it was salvaged from a submarine, though it was wonderful anyway. So here's my question: If I can't get The Leopard on DVD, will someone please tell me what global domination is good for? No, not you, Mr. Rumsfeld. Bueller?